The stage is set. By 7:15 p.m., a sold-out audience fills the seats at the Tsongas Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Film clips of “The Deer Hunter,” “Julie & Julia,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Adaptation” and more are streaming from the Jumbotrons that hover high above the stage to accommodate those in the nosebleed sections within the stadium. Although it’s April Fool’s Day, there’s no joking about the fact that everyone wants to meet Meryl Streep.

OK, so when two unfamiliar characters stepped into the spotlight to take their seats as Andre Dubus III and the Academy Award-winning Streep were announced, a raucous laughter ensued. Everyone knew it was a prank. And it was Streep’s idea, which is commendable, considering she’s jetlagged from recently returning from England, where she’s been filming “Suffragette,” a story about the struggle for women’s voting rights in the 20th century.

Thanks to Streep’s hijinx, UMass Lowell English Department Professor Dubus, also author of “House of Sand and Fog,” among other titles, has no need to break the ice as he begins his interview with the 18-time Academy Award nominee and two-time Oscar winning actor.

“A Conversation with Meryl Streep” is the second in a series of the “Chancellor’s Speaker Series,” a scholarship fundraiser event. Last year, celebrity author Stephen King took the stage, proving the series to be a success.

Meet the real Meryl

As a young woman growing up in New Jersey, Streep encountered the same issues everyone faces: being popular. Her first real role was to transform into the popular girl in high school.

“Yeah. That’s acting,” she says.

Sure enough, popularity became her reality. Her acting abilities were obviously part of her nature, especially when you figure she’s knocked every role she’s landed out of the park. Tonight, however, as she faces a stadium of swooning fans, one even wearing a T-shirt silkscreened with Streep’s face, one might ponder whether she thinks she may have gone a bit too far and might want some normalcy in her life.

But then you listen to her, and you know that when she’s not in the midst of acting in a film or attending the Golden Globes or Oscars in a Lanvin gown, she’s normal to a fault. In fact, she says this same morning, her “boring life,” as she refers to it, began with the household chore nobody else will do.

“I cleaned the cat litter because that’s my job,” she states in exasperation of her home life. “For some reason, of all the people that move through and touch the cat and love the cat and say, ‘Oh, I love you so much’ and then leave, I’m just sayin’…”

During this 90-minute conversation, the lovely Streep, dressed in all black with a multicolored beaded necklace that falls well below her waist, conveys her penchant for drama with physicality (bending down and swooshing her blonde mane back at least a few times) and vocal gestures of humbleness in her choice to act for a living.

Her acting began in high school, when she tried out for a role in a play and landed the lead.

“I didn’t know,” she says of her ability to act. “I knew I could remember the lines really fast. I didn’t know what I knew. I was on autopilot.”

Because she had experience in high school plays, she continued acting while at Vassar College.

“I was showing off,” she explains, and then changes her voice to a low, deep tone: “But it wasn’t going to be what I was going to do for my life. I never felt that way. I still don’t. I think I really like looking at houses. I could sell real estate.”

Acting is something Streep has succeeded in because she’s talented, and although she knows this, she’s also humbled and says she was simply “young and lucky.” Following college, while dating a boy who attended Dartmouth, she performed in plays “just to be around him,” she says.

And then she became impatient performing in plays below her acting abilities.

“I wanted better,” she recalls, “and I sensed there was more to it and that I had the capacity to do that. I just didn’t know how.”

One year after she graduated from Vassar, she looked into Juilliard and Yale School of Drama. When she compared the cost of Juilliard’s application fee of $40 to Yale’s $15 fee, her decision was made. She applied only to Yale.

In her third year, she applied for law boards because she once again thought acting was not something she wanted to pursue as a career.

“I thought it was vanity,” she confesses.

Fortunately for all moviegoers, she didn’t quit.

Over the years, she’s developed a “don’t mess with me” attitude that may have begun during her childhood years growing up in New Jersey, but cultivated from experience in theater and Hollywood.

“Everyone thinks there’s a perfect way to be,” she says of Hollywood, “especially for girls, but for boys too. If only I looked like this. If only my nose didn’t go this way. If only, if only. Your thing unique to you is the most valuable thing you have. Your weird thing is what makes you memorable.”

Addressing a question from one of the many acting students in the crowd, she takes a look back at “Kramer vs. Kramer,” a film that brought Streep to our hearts, and says today she realizes she was beautiful, but back then she thought she was fat and her teeth crooked.

“If only my nose didn’t go that way,” she recalls thinking. “In early reviews, certain critics said ‘She’s got this really long unattractive nose,’ and yet, that’s something that’s unique and that was me, and what are you gonna do? And it’s like my name is so weird. Streep. But you remember it. Whatever is weird about you — maybe is your strength.”

Streep’s strength in acting comes from working with talented co-stars, such as Christopher Cooper, a personal friend of Streep’s who is in the audience. Cooper is better known for his roles in “August: Osage County” and “Adaptation,” both with Streep, and then there’s “The Bourne Identity” and the upcoming “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” The latter, he says, will bring forth his character in a more substantial role for Spider-Man 3.

He says of his co-star, “After I initially got over the complete intimidation” of working with Streep, he had fun. “She’s humble, and a great host.”

He’s referring to working with her on “August: Osage County” and how she was instrumental in making the crew a family.

“She brings terrific variety, and that’s a gold mine to a director,” he says. “She keeps all the other actors on their toes.”

Both Cooper and Streep have the same mindset when it comes to putting your best talent forward.

“The people I admire who do it the best, I have no idea how they’ve achieved what they do,” she says, pointing at Cooper in the audience. “When you’re working with them, the people who are truly great, it’s a seamless exchange of thought, emotion and physicality. You can’t parse it while you’re in the moment.”

In a separate interview, Cooper refers to Streep by saying, “If you want to improve your tennis game, you’ve got to play with someone better than you. Some of the greatest performances come from what the other person gives you. Often you get an interesting take on something you might not have thought.”

During Streep’s interview with Dubus III, she states of her performances and of one actor drawing from another actor’s gifts: “It took me a long time to realize I get from people. It’s like food for me. And I give that to people. It’s taken me a long time to realize that.”

Giving to UMass Lowell

Before her lecture, Streep spoke to 100 theater and art students at UMass Lowell, and at the end of her interview, she stands to sign a director’s chair for a raffle to raise funds for the college’s scholarship funds. Ticket sales total $2,000 for the raffle, and ticket sales for “A Conversation with Meryl Streep,” account for more than $230,000 in the new Meryl Streep Endowed Scholarship for English majors, and the Joan Hertzberg Endowed Scholarship for support of students who excel in math.

Education is most important to Streep, and she says that her overall education and life experience speaks more about what made her into the actor she is today than any acting classes she’s taken.

At the close of the event, several students lined up to ask Streep a question, many having to do with advice on acting. Streep’s response was in line with her personality: “Don’t let the bastards get you down. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up.”

When Dubus III referred to Timberland Regional High School’s halt of the production of “Sweeney Todd,” based on its violent plot, he asked Streep her thoughts on the subject.

She replied, “I didn’t hear about that. Well, gosh, it’s such great music. People slow down at traffic accidents — that’s not against the law. Kids should be allowed to do the show.”

In response to her own acting career, she conveys to the audience: “Being an actor has opened my soul.” She doesn’t incorporate one actual technique in acting, but takes from many schools of thought. And she has definitely written her own scripts, including the last scene in “Kramer vs. Kramer” when she tells the judge why she should regain custody of her son. The scene, she says, was mostly unwritten.

“A woman who leaves a child is sort of cast as a villain,” she explains. “You never really find out why she left.”

So the main cast of characters were put to the task of writing the scene they thought would work best. Streep’s scene was selected as the best one, and that’s the one shown in the film.

Going beyond memorizing lines is typical of Streep, and she’s known as a perfectionist in her craft, preparing for roles by going the extra mile. She’s learned Polish and then learned how to speak it with a German accent, she’s studied and spied on upper middle class women in the playground for her role in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and now she’s learning how to play the bass.

“You have to be reckless to take this profession on,” she advises. “You want to explore a lot of things, try a lot of things. I think if I were starting out I’d do as much as I could anywhere for free.”

She is referring to making a web series or YouTube video.

“There are so many ways to express yourself,” she adds. “You have to be flexible. Never give up.”

She offers some insight into her own breakthrough, sharing how she was performing in New York with Robert De Niro in the audience. She portrayed a maid and decided she would fall down every time she got on stage.

“From that, he cast me in ‘The Deer Hunter,’” she says of her first major role in 1978. “I had the completely wrong idea about what it was like to be in movies,” she admits. “It isn’t like that.”

In “The Deer Hunter,” Streep improvised with De Niro because, she says, “He was into that, too. It was really fun.”

A seemingly endless string of Box Office hits later, Streep continues to have fun with her accidental career and leaves the audience with one thought:

“My great hope is that everyone will be famous and it will spread the wealth and people will become more actively involved,” she says in closing. “It’s already happening with Twitter to virally spread the word — good stuff — about what should be promoted.”

And referring to the question on a movie about her life someday, she replies, “The idea just gives me angina.”

Streep is merrily going about life fooling other actors into believing she is whom she’s supposed to be portraying.

She says, “I’m amazed at how rich a career I’ve had, and I’m very grateful for it, but in my next life I want to be a musician. I feel like that’s the highest art. That’s the one. Everybody gets it. Around the world. Everybody gets it. It goes right in. No complications.”